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Linus: Praying for Hammer to Win

Posted by chrisd on from the thems-fighting-words dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The boys at Intel can't be happy with the latest opposition to the IA-64 instruction set. According to this Inquirer scoop, Linus himself has weighed in, and it appears he's putting his eggs in the x86-64 basket. In the original usenet post, he goes so far as to say that 'We're ... praying that AMD's x86-64 succeeds in the market, forcing Intel to make Yamhill their standard platform.'"

4 of 485 comments (clear)

  1. no AMD vs. Intel by reverse+flow+reactor · · Score: 5, Informative

    Maybe I misinterpreted the original post, but I thought that this had more to do 64-bit vs. 32-bit (and the limitations of a 32-bit platform) than it has to do with AMD vs. Intel.

    The kernel compiles on so many different architectures, but with most of them being 64-bit (PPC, sparc, MIPS...). However, i386 is the dominant architecture by sheer numbers. To maintain crosss-architecture compatibility, the code has to support the lowest quality architeture (i386). By pushing towards a 64-bit architecture, the limitations of 32-bit can be left behind (oh yeah, but the nasty issue of backwards compatibility).

    Unless I just misinterpreted the post.

    --

    The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein

  2. AMD's kernel summit presentation by awptic · · Score: 5, Informative


    For anyone who has an hour and a half to spare... AMD (along with a few people from SuSE) made a great presentation on the X86-64 technology at the Linux kernel summit in Ottawa a little while back; the MP3 and OGG files are available at the sourceforge kernel foundry.

  3. Re:This is a bit ironic.. by gmack · · Score: 5, Informative

    That is _only_ true for module interfaces. In the past hes been very picky about changes that break userspace.

  4. Re:Clarification by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Informative
    The core of these chips like Pentiums are really RISC chips with hardware wrappers to implement the X86 instructions. So it's just a waste if die space. IA64 is purer and a much better long term choice.

    Except that two CPU generations from now, Intel will have had to change the underlying architecture of the IA-64 chips to get performance improvemets, but they'll have to leave the instruction set compatible. So, they'll have a hardware wrapper around the IA-64 instruction set. And this wrapper is going to have to try and second-guess the output of those rocket-science IA-64 compilers and rewrite the results on the fly.

    Why not just leave well enough alone and let the CPU rewrite code from today's simple, well understood compilers? The current x86 instruction set works like a bytecode VM. There's nothing wrong with that, especially since the IA-64 CPUs and compilers haven't exactly been blowing away the x86 chips in the performance area.